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Clairol is a personal care products division of Procter & Gamble. The Clairol company was started in 1931 by an entrepreneurial chemist and his wife who named their enterprise after a hair-coloring preparation they found while traveling in France. In the 1950s, after two decades of selling the company’s hair tint to beauty salons, Clairol became a household name when it launched the first one-step home hair color formula, Miss Clairol Hair Color Bath, which debuted with the now-famous catchphrase, “Does she…or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” Within six years of Miss Clairol’s launch, 70% of women were coloring their hair.

With a shampoo-in hair color and a memorable catchphrase, Clairol captured the feminist sensibilities of the day, wrote Malcom Gladwell, author of social-psychology bestsellers The Tipping Point and Blink, in “True Colors,” a 1999 New Yorker article about the hidden history of hair dye. He posited: “In writing the history of women in the postwar era, did we forget something important? Did we leave out hair?”

Today Clairol makes hair coloring, hair spray, shampoo, hair conditioner and styling consumables and publishes a free beauty magazine called Color Source.

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